Parashat Re’eh - 25 Av 5768 / August 7, 2026

INCITING YOUR NEIGHBORS

This week’s Torah Portion is Re’eh; we are warned not to let our friends and family incite us to do wrong and follow false gods.  In Judaism, incitement is called “hasatah”, and we will be learning more about that at Torah Study tomorrow morning. 

Judaism is very aware of the power of mobs and how easy it is to incite them in the name of the greater good to do things that harm the greater good.   Whether it is Korach or the Spies that incite the people to turn against Moses, or it is the followers of Bar Kochba to fight against the Romans, we have seen too often how groups can be incited to do harm in the name of good. 

One thing I’ve been noticing a lot lately is the way that one particular lobby group has been used to incite people and to rally them against a common evil. 

I am talking about AIPAC.  This week, many Jews are talking about Abdul Al-Sayed’s primary victory in Michigan and what it means.  I’m not going to get into Al-Sayed’s candidacy, but I do want to talk about his use of AIPAC as a bogey-man, because agree with AIPAC or not, it is being used more and more as a potent symbol of everything wrong with America, Israel, and the Jews, and to hear them tell it, AIPAC is preventing us from having national health care, child care, better schools and all good things.  If it weren’t for AIPAC, America would be a utopia of social services and a bastion of peace and the warmth of collectivism.

In other words, AIPAC is the new stand-in for the Jew as the obstacle to salvation, something that is deeply rooted in early Christian antisemitism, and more recently repackaged in Marxist thinking.   The oldest form of antisemitism is to see the Jews as what is getting in the way of goodness, which is why it has bothered me to see so many Jews jumping on the AIPAC-bashing bandwagon. 

Let me share a story that happened at the mosque next door a few years ago.   Temple Sinai and Ohavi Zedek arranged a meeting with the leadership of the mosque to talk about how we might cooperate as religious minorities facing discrimination.  We talked about how it benefits all our children in schools and gives us more strength as allies. 

All was fine until we started sharing examples of antisemitism.   I was talking about how saying Jewish money controls the world is one of the most heinous of antisemitic lies, and I gave the example of saying AIPAC controls what America does. 

One of the members of the mosque’s board immediately yelled that this was not antisemitism, this was a fact!  AIPAC does control America, and it controls the world!  

I think you can agree with AIPAC or strongly disagree with AIPAC without seeing it as Satan. I have done both over the many years of my membership in AIPAC.   I have led student groups to walk out of AIPAC conferences because I felt they were doing something deeply unethical, but I have also taken students to AIPAC conferences to be exposed to lobbying, advocacy, and complexity.

In fact,  I disagree with what many PACS and SUPERPACS stand for, and some of them give as much or more to candidates than AIPAC.  

I disagree with what health insurance companies lobby for, but they spend as much or more than AIPAC, and surely, they are standing in the way of national health care more than AIPAC. But most progressive political candidates, like Mamdani, Sanders or Al Sayed, always list AIPAC first, if they bother to mention other PACS at all.  They have made bashing AIPAC central part of their rhetoric and campaigns.  They have made AIPAC the barrier to goodness.   For example, all of them somehow put AIPAC first on the list of obstacles to the goal of health care to children, even though US support to Israel is a drop in the bucket of what national health care would cost:

·      Not to mention that over 90% of the military AID Israel gets has to be spent in America on American arms;

·      Not to mention that AIPAC’s money comes entirely from donations by Americans who have the right to lobby their government;

·      Not to mention that AI and Crypto spend more lobbying, that Qatar spends more lobbying, and the largest Superpacs are those supporting Trump and MAGA or those supporting Democratic candidates. In fact, ACTBLUE is the largest.

Those facts don’t matter when you have a good whipping post that riles people up using ancient antisemitism in a new package that most people don’t even realize is happening, including many Jews.

Of course, some will argue that while AIPAC is funded by ‘millionaires and billionaires,’ “our pacs’ are grassroots, and funded by small donations”.  This argument seems to be rooted in what I think if a false dogma that “crowdsourced” and “grassroots” are inherently morally superior to elites.   

·      It seems to forget that lynchings and pogroms are “crowdsourced”;

·      that the Crusades were crowdsourced;

·      that Hitler was crowdsourced. 

·      That crowds can gather for good or for bad, and being popular is in no way and indication of what is ethical. 

Formally reputable organizations like Amnesty International and Doctors without Borders have had their neutrality destroyed by the need to garner large numbers of small donations to maintain their very large budgets, and surprise!  Nothing seems to get more small donations than bashing Israel, bashing AIPAC, and using antisemitic dog-whistles, namely that Jews, or Israel, or the “Jewish Lobby” are standing in the way of peace and justice and all good things. 

Perhaps this is why Judaism has always been deeply skeptical about mass movements, and why the Torah wisely teaches us:

לֹֽא־תִהְיֶ֥ה אַחֲרֵֽי־רַבִּ֖ים לְרָעֹ֑ת׃

Do not go with the majority to do evil.

Shabbat Shalom.